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Monitoring online groups offers insight into ISIS attacks

New analysis identifies patterns in terrorists’ social network activity

VIRTUAL TERROR Smoke rises from the Syrian town of Kobane during a 2014 attack by Iraqi Kurdish forces on Islamic State fighters who had taken over the settlement. Researchers say a new computer model may be able to use patterns of pro-ISIS group formation on social networks to predict the timing of terrorist attacks.

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Social media supporters of the Islamic State, or ISIS, form online groups that may provide clues crucial to predicting when terrorist attacks will take place, a new analysis finds.

These virtual communities drive ISIS activity on a Facebook-like site called VKontakte, say physicist Neil Johnson of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., and colleagues. VKontakte, a social networking service based in Russia with more than 350 million users, allows messaging in many languages and is used worldwide.

In the June 17 Science, Johnson’s team describes a mathematical model that predicts online groups of ISIS supporters will proliferate days before real-world Islamic State attacks. That’s just what happened in September 2014, researchers say. Pro-ISIS groups on VKontakte mushroomed the day before Islamic State forces overran Kobane, a small Syrian town.

The researchers

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